Remote Application Server, the way it should be.

We have been using Parallels RAS since the beginning of the Covid Pandemic, and continue to use it to this day. It has an easy-to-use main dashboard on the RAS Server directly and easily allows you to configure any setup you like. Whether this is having multiple gateways, to allow for easy load balancing, RDS, or VDI environments. We use Parallels in an RDS and physical PC setting, and the RDS side works as we'd expect. If I was to say what our primary issue is, it would be to do with the physical PC side. This is because as the PCs do get turned off, the RAS server-client keeps saying that machines need updating as it doesn't like them being offline. As a business, we will be continuing to use Parallels RAS, as we're very happy with the product, after coming from one of their main competitors - Citrix.

We use Parallels with the RDS technology for a service that is always available, and in case they don't have any alternative up. We give everyone that has access to use Parallels this as a default option, and on the times there are other issues internally this will always be available whilst Parallels is available. We do not use the VDI section with Parallels. Most of our users (unless they use a company laptop) have access to remote directly onto their own office machine, this helps them with knowing that everything they use is already set up, etc).

We do not allow the use of the HTML5 portal or with mobile devices. The brief duration that we did experiment with the HTML5 however was a pleasant experience, incredibly easy to set up and easy to use.

We host our Parallels RAS on VMWare, along with our RDS boxes. In our viewpoint, there are very few applications that would support this as we are using Windows Server on our VMWare platform, and do not have anything running directly at the ESXi level. So the application works as expected in our environment.

We have set up some stricter policies with our Parallels, preventing any drive mapping from the local machine to the remote destination, file sharing, and clipboard sharing, to try and help prevent any data from leaving the company this way. We also enforce MFA via a third party and disallow anyone from bypassing this. And have all data encrypted via SSL.